sexta-feira, julho 31, 2015

Disclaimer: I received an
advance reader's copy of this book directly from the publisher in exchange for
my honest review. All opinions expressed are my own, and no monetary
compensation was received for this review.

(The book is due to be
published on September 2015; review written 31/07/2015)

I don’t usually compare books, but in this case
I’m going to make an exception. I’ve read this volume back-to-back with Erne’s book, and what a difference it was. This is by no means derogatory to
Edmondson’s book. They’re just two simply different takes, aimed at different
audiences. I loved them both for different reasons. This one is a very short
volume, but it’s my kind of book about Shakespeare: It maps Edmondson’s
personal history with Shakespeare. It’s not a “technical” book about
Shakespeare, like Erne’s. It’s much more fluid and down-to-earth:

"This book is written from within my own reactions to Shakespeare, which have grown and developed over the twenty years I have lived, worked, written and taught in Stratford-upon-Avon."Edmondson poses and answers the question: "In asking how Shakespeare wrote we might turn the question around and ask ourselves: if we wanted to write like Shakespeare, what would we have to do?"While reading this, I got wondering whether I could also write "like" Shakespeare...

Puck's epilogue is one of my favorite passage
from all of Shakespeare's works. Why? As with Edmondson, it’s all down to our
personal history with Shakespeare (I have one too…). At the British Council,
during our role-playing sessions, my teacher, Vicky Hartnack, made me recite it
over, and over again, until it was as familiar to me as my own reflection. “Owning”
Shakespeare is being able to break it apart, and this is a passage from his
work that will allow me to truly make it also mine. Even though it feels a bit
like sacrilege to change any of Shakespeare's work, I must do it…

For my break/remake, I chose to spin Puck's
epilogue in a different way. Rather than a short monologue directed at the
audience, I changed it into a conversation between Egeus and Puck told in the
format of a (very) short story. Forgive me if it's a bit messy. It’s not easy
to rewrite Shakespeare…

“If we shadows have offended,

Think but this and all is mended:

That you have but slumbered here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend.

If you pardon, we will mend.

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearnèd luck

Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,

We will make amends ere long.

Else the Puck a liar call.

So good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends.”

in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Act Five: Scene One, Lines 440-455

A couple warnings before you read:

Puck is a girl in my retelling. I've always
imagined her that way as I read the play, and it wasn't until I saw MSND on
stage for the first time that I even realized Puck was supposed to be a boy.

While I presented Puck as a girl, this version
of her was largely influenced by Stanley Tucci's portrayal of Puck in the 1999
version of the film.

The dialogue can be a bit odd at times. It's a
mix between modern, formal, and, at the very end, Shakespearean language. It
seemed to flow properly to me, but I'm a horrible judge of my own work, so
don't take my word for it.

In Victorian times, Hyacinth represented
playfulness and mischief.

So, with as much further ado as I can squeeze
out, here is my retelling of Puck's epilogue:

Egeus bolted upright in bed, gasping and clutching at his chest. What a
perfectly horrid dream. Faerie queens in love with asses? Meddling sprites with
magic flowers? A play so terrible it was wonderful? And his daughter, his
precious Hermia, married to that lout, Lysander? Utterly preposterous. “Thank
the gods it was only a dream.” He muttered to himself.

“Ah, but was it just a dream?” A tinkling voice asked from the end of
his bed.

Egeus shouted, startled, and reached for the dagger at his bedside.

“Well that’s just pointless.” The voice said, half-laughing,
half-admonishing. With a loud pop, a young woman appeared on his feet. A
hyacinth crown sat on her curling brown hair, and brilliant hazel eyes laughed
at him above an upturned nose and a perpetual smirk. If he looked closely, he
could just see pointed ears poking through her hair and two small horns holding
up her flower crown. “You can’t even see me if I don’t allow it. What makes you
think I’d allow you to stab me?”

“Who… what are you?” He stuttered out, still grasping the dagger tightly
in his palm.

“I’m offended, my pompous little lordling. Am I forgotten so quickly?”
Another loud pop sounded, and the woman disappeared off of his feet.
Reappearing next to his head, she gave a low bow. “Robin Goodfellow, at your
service. Better known as Puck to my friends. You may call me Robin.”

“Now see here!” Egeus called
indignantly. “I am a man of-“

She waved her hand in his face, cutting off his words. “Pish-posh.
Compared to me, old Methusala himself is a lordling.” She gave a laugh and
popped onto his feet again. Leaning forward over her crossed legs, Robin
snapped her fingers and lit the candles on Egeus’ bedside table. “Now answer my
question, oh arrogant one. What makes you think it was just a dream?”

“What else could it be?” He asked
indignantly, yanking the blankets up to cover his cold chest and causing Robin
to topple backwards on the bed. “My Hermia is to marry Demetrius, or she shall
die. Duke Theseus himself has ordered it to be so.”

“Technically he ordered her to marry a man
who happens to be as equally blind and conceited as yourself, or she’ll be
forced to join a nunnery, but we’ll quibble over semantics later.” She giggled,
righting herself. “Now think, Egeus. If it wasn’t a dream, what could it be?”

“It was nothing. A silly trick brought about by too much wine with
supper. Just like you.”

“Of course. That was a dream. I’m a dream. This is all a dream.” She
grinned, bouncing a little and making the bed shake. “But let’s pretend, just
for a moment,that it wasn’t. Let’s pretend it was a warning.”

“A warning of what?”

“Of what will happen if you don’t let go of your short-sighted need to
have your daughter obey your every whim, and allow her to marry her true love.”
She glanced exaggeratedly from side-to-side. Cupping her hands around her
mouth, Robin whispered, “Just to clue you in, that’s Lysander.”

“I will never-“

“You will, or everything you just dreamed will come to pass.” Robin
interrupted, leaning back on her hands. “Well, maybe not everything. I added in
the part about Titania and the ass just for fun, but the rest of it, yeah,
that’s a warning.

“You caused Theseus to make a decision, near the eve of his wedding,
when he’s madly in lust with his prisoner bride that follows the law but goes
against love. You caused him distress, and, as my king and queen are rather
fond of him, you caused them distress. Stupid move, really, but you mortals
seem eerily proficient at that sort of nonsense.”

Egeus eyed her suspiciously. “Thank you.”

She cocked an eyebrow, giving him a derisive smile. “And to what do I
owe those thanks?”

“This is most certainly a dream.”

“We’re pretending it’s not, remember?”

“You just told me that I’ve angered the king and queen of the faeries by
petitioning the duke to force my daughter to live under my rule. That would
strain even the most inventive man’s imagination.”

“Wait a few centuries.” Robin said dismissively. “At any rate, still not
a dream. I’m real.” She bounced again to prove her point. “I’m here, and your
daughter will marry Lysander, one way or another.”

“One way or another?”

“You have two choices, Egeus.” Robin said solemnly, her smiling dropping
for the first time since she popped into existence on his bedspread. “You can
listen to this warning, allow your daughter to marry Lysander, point Demetrius
in Helena’s direction once you tell him the engagement is off, and, in doing
so, ease the ire of my masters.”

“Or you’ll use a magic flower to make it happen anyway?” He scoffed.

She gave him a pitying look. “Or I’ll use a magic flower to make it
happen anyway.” She confirmed. “Hermia will still marry Lysander. Demetrius
will still marry Helena, not your daughter. You will not get your way, and, by
being so stubborn, you’ll earn the everlasting odium of King Oberon and Queen
Titania. In ordinary circumstances, putting your own wishes above the
well-being of your daughter is a horrid decision. In this case, it may prove
fatal. Most faeries are mischievous, but my masters easily blur the lines
between ‘harmless fun’ and ‘death by donkey.’”

“Exactly like you,” Robin provided gently, “but he’s not right for your
Hermia. She loves Lysander, and Lysander loves her enough to risk abandoning
his home, lands, and title and hiding away with a dowager aunt as long as it
means he gets to call her his wife.” She shrugged, the smirk slipping back into
place. “Besides, it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. As I said, this
will happen, one way or another. The only choice you have is whether or not to
allow it to happen with your blessing.

“So,” she popped off the bed again and reappeared holding her hand out
to him, “shall we go wake Hermia and tell her the good news?”

Egeus stared at her, and her hand, reproachfully, before pointedly
turning his head away. Robin let out a long sigh, shaking her head. “So be it.
Since we do not part as friends, this Puck canno’ force amends."

And with a final pop, she was gone.

(Shakespeare's traits: characterisation, dramatic situations, stagecraft and poetic expression are all absent in my attempt...Unlike Bach and Shakespeare, I was never that great at recycling and reinventing other's work...)

When comparing Edmondson to Harold Bloom what
can I say? Bloom is very conservative. He is affirmative to a modern form of
Bardolatry, treats Shakespeare as a Religion, compares Hamlet to David and
Jesus, insists on the curious idea, that Shakespeare did invent the modern
concept of personality, he dismisses the work of Stanley Wells in a rude manner
and is although merciless with Peter Brook and every sort of Feminist or
postmodern Interpretation. Who can withstand the verdict of an angry old man?
Nobody. But I really appreciated his judgment regarding "Merchant".

Edmondson's take is all about the journey: "Shakespeare's language inspires actors to portray a heightened reality, which in turn invites the audience to accompany them on a powerful emotional journey. We know whenever we arrive at a theatre to watch a Shakespeare play that, for the better part of three hours, something significant is about to unfold [ ]."

"No one owns Shakespeare, though anyone can experience a sense of ownership of him." This essentially means that Shakespeare is the conduit through which we can better understand ourselves.When a balanced account of Shakespeare’s work comes along, like this one by Edmondson, I’m always delighted.

8. ‘Bad quartos’ and their origins: Romeo and
Juliet, Henry V, and Hamlet

9. Theatricality, literariness, and the texts
of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, and Hamlet

Appendix A: The plays of Shakespeare and his
contemporaries in print, 1584–1623

Appendix B: Heminge and Condell’s ‘Stolne, and
surreptitious copies’ and the Pavier quartos

Appendix C: Shakespeare and the circulation of
dramatic manuscripts

“Whose Shakespeare?
Does he belong to the theater or to the academy, is he of the stage or of the
page, should we watch him or read him? These are false dichotomies, but the
realization that they are false does not mean we can easily escape them. [ ] I
argue that the long play texts Shakespeare wrote for many of his tragedies and
histories are significantly different from and longer than the play texts
spoken by the actors on stage, and that Shakespeare knew so as he was writing
them. To call the shorter version “theatrical” and the longer “literary,” as I
do in Shakespeare as a Literary Dramatist, is right in that “theatrical” and
“literary” refer to the two institutions in which Shakespeare saw his plays
materialize, the public theatre and the book trade.”

With this extremely simple statement at the
beginning of his book, I was hooked, line and sinker!

Who's there, huh? A Literary Dramatist, a Playwright,
or both? On this end - an astonished mind now cognizant of the
importance/emphasis of an opening statement. Openers, despite their value, are
often taken for granted as simply a first remark or beginning to a
conversation, literary work, play, etc. However, this opener, regardless of
situation, was not just a simple statement. It was finely crafted for a
specific purpose. Is this opening the
work of a Literary Dramatist, a playwright, or is the question meaningless?

Let’s delve deeper into Erne’s argument.

Let's use the example of a conversation. A
beautiful girl is standing at the other end of a coffee shop - what is the
first thing running through your mind? What is the first thing that I should
say to her?? You rack your mind for the best possible opener for the situation
and you go for it. Unfortunately, the amount of effort that went into this
opening statement will not be appreciated. However, when analyzing literature,
we can discern the true value of this first sentence and appreciate our
interpretation of the author's intentions.

As a habitual reflex, the first thought that
entered my mind upon reading Hamlet's opening statement of "who's
there" was its companion in the trite, yet pervasive joke of our
generation: knock, knock. This onomatopoeia may not have existed in
Shakespeare's time, but the underlying message remains the same. The literal
meaning of knock, knock is to request the opening of the door. We would not be
knocking if we knew in advance that nobody was there; similarly, we would not
be asking "who's there" if we had no suspicion of some other entity
present.

What is the purpose of the "knock,
knock" and the "who's there"? The satisfaction of a curiosity.
As mentioned previously, this can be perceived physically as a curiosity for
the contents of the other side of the door. However, for our analysis of
Shakespeare, this involves the transcending of a boundary that crosses time and
space. "Knock, knock" can be represented as our opening of the play
and "who's there" can be Shakespeare's request to learn more about
the reader. This reader can exist in Elizabethan or modern times, be of any
race, socioeconomic status, intelligence, gender, or location. What an opening
statement - if one could find the perfect introduction, this is it.

This is why the analysis of literature is
pleasurable to all who indulge. Anyone can pick up a play and interpret the
work any way he chooses and, simultaneously, Shakespeare opens up the world of
his play to all. Unfortunately, finding a similar solution for political and
social disarray has not been as profoundly simple.

I think Shakespeare is "learning"
which is why it is so easy for us to identify with his characters, they are
searching for a new order. Shakespeare
reminds me of authors who lived in great transitions like Tolstoy and
Faulkner. They are witnessing the decay
of an old system which no longer works and searching for an alternative. So they live in that creative tension and
mystery which is so true for human existence.
Elizabeth I is outlawing Roman Catholicism, she outlaws the Catholic
Corpus Christi plays which had been performed in Europe for almost a thousand
years and taught most illiterate Christians the stories of the Bible. Now she wants a more literary Drama that will
appeal to all levels of society. So
Shakespeare gives us many levels of society in his plays. There are plenty of dirty jokes for the
groundlings standing in the audience as well as elegant poetry and hymns of
ravishing beauty and profundity for the educated audience sitting in the boxes
of the theater. He believes in Monarchy
and gives much tribute to Elizabeth, but you can feel his restlessness. He knows there is something more than the old
chain of being and aristocracy. But
Shakespeare can't see it yet. It will
take the American Revolution to birth Democracy. I don't think Shakespeare could have accepted
the destruction of all aristocracy as happened in the Bolshevik Revolution for
example. But he also wouldn’t quite
accept the injustice of royalty either, because he is as torn as we are so
often searching for a resolution of different extremes of our nature. And that tension, that tension is the truth
of who we are, capable of the highest flights of imagination and magic but also
so subject to foolish pride and cruelty and blindness.

Shakespeare as a Literary Dramatist. I always
believed that Shakespeare can have a dual “approach”, i.e., we need the stage and the text to make him fully available to me. The
“Who’s there?” opening is one case. Another case pointing to Shakespeare as
Dramatist is the so-called “greenery question” or the Garden in “Romeo and
Juliet”.

The enclosed garden is a western literary
tradition’s way of telling us by means of scenery that there is someone trying
to get inside someone else’s space, mind and heart. “Romeo and Juliet” both
have a very intense first encounter in the party. But it is in the garden where
they become vocal about it. Let's remember this is Juliet's (or her family's)
garden. I want to really think about how the scene develops. Romeo wanders in
the garden voicing his thoughts about Juliet. Juliet comes out from her window
to the balcony and into the garden. Because of a happy coincidence she speaks
first and Romeo can hear what’s in her secret mind about him (by the way this
window scene reminds me of a window scene in “War and Peace”). There is really
no wooing, whatever wooing Romeo made he made at the party, there’s only the
free interchange of thoughts, silliness and vows.

I think there’s no place else where this could
have happened. And I think this is so because the garden is not a place
entirely domesticated nor entirely wild. There is some sense of safety there,
which is why Romeo hides in there. And maybe this is why Juliet decides to
speak her mind there instead of inside her rooms. But also some sense of danger
from being found out by her relatives. There is also a tug-of-war between
proper behavior and letting loose. First we see Juliet kind of flustered by
being discovered. But this quickly changes into a mood of confidence towards
her lover. I think the contrast could be also between acting civil and acting
passionate.

So that’s why I think the Shakespeare used the
balcony and the greenery, the two levels: above and below. To convey that
what´s going on here is an impromptu meeting between two people in love, and to
convey the sense of safety and danger that surrounds this couple. I think this
is also why their wedding night happens at her place and their second exchange
here at the same balcony.

Another literary imagery is the one about the
Forest. Shakespeare places his characters in the primeval forest, beyond the
bounds of civilization – and he stands in a great literary and cultural
tradition by doing so. He would have known books, performances, and oral tales
that used the woods as a place where anything goes. At night in such woods,
people were liberated from the strictures of class, gender, law, perhaps even
physics. But, equally, they were placed at the mercy of others liberated from
those strictures, and of powerful supernatural forces that could usually be
held at bay in the daylight of villages, towns, homes, and churches.

To Shakespeare’s forebears and contemporaries,
a forest could be a place of magic, of terror, of transformation; “of
adventure, love, and spiritual vision… exile and hunt… destiny and prophecy, or,
perhaps, many of these at once. Other writers often foregrounded the forest’s
terror. Before Shakespeare, in “Morte
D’Arthur”, Malory sent two of King Arthur’s knights into the forest to die.
Writes Corinne J. Saunders in “The
Forest of Medieval Romance”, “the
forest landscape through which [Balin] journeys acts against him… the forest is
presented as a landscape possessed of its own potentially sinister order… the
result is destruction and death.” Long after Shakespeare, Hawthorne sends
his Puritan protagonist Young Goodman Brown into the woods surrounding his New
England village; there, Brown either discovers or imagines that everyone in his
village is in fact serving the devil, and finds an incurable darkness in his
own heart that he can never lose.

Shakespeare’s vision of the forest is more
benign, though certainly not completely so. He puts Helena and Hermia through
plenty of human misery. He never does release Demetrius from his love spell,
leading one to question the foundation of Demetrius’s marriage to Helena; the
other marriages have their all-too-familiar problems as well.

Still, people have been partnered, roughly as
comedic form and Shakespeare's audiences thought they should be. Nobody has
died, departs in shackles, or fears eternal condemnation. In contrast with,
say, “Romeo and Juliet”, “Othello”, or “King Lear”, nobody’s actions have
proven irrevocably catastrophic. And if something happened that you didn’t care
for, it can be very easily remedied: “Gentles,
do not reprehend. If you pardon, we will mend.” Some problems are fixable,
after all. When you are called to waken, it is not from a nightmare, but from a
very pleasant dream indeed.

Bottom-line: This book came from left field,
and some of the arguments are pretty convincing.

Facts “demonstrated” by Erne (enclosed in
commas, because Karl Popper wouldn’t agree with these proofs…):

Shakespeare
was by a long way the most successful dramatist in print in his lifetime and
for decades after, i.e., considering the number of editions published between
1590 and 1616;

“Shakespeare, apart from being a
playwright who wrote theatrical texts for the stage, was also a literary
dramatist who produced readings texts for the page”;

“Shakespeare was aware of and not indifferent to the literary reception
of his plays in print; he and many of his contemporaries considered his printed
plays as more than discardable ephemera, as literary texts of some prestige,
and passages from them were included in commonplace books and anthologies”;

Shakespeare
and his fellow players of the Lord’s Chamberlain’s Men were in favor of the
publication of his plays while he still lived;

Shakespeare
outsold all other dramatists by a wide margin (on average 20% of plays were
reprinted within 9 years of the first publication, but in terms of Shakespeare’s
it was 60%);

Misattribution
of plays to Shakespeare as publishers tried to cash in on his popularity;

"Bad"
quartos (notably Q1 Hamlet, Q1 Henry V, and Q1 Romeo) are the closest we can
come to the form in which Shakespeare's plays were performed on the early
modern stage;

Quartos
and Folios alike were too long to have been played in the theatres for which
they were ostensibly written;

Any
play over 2,300 lines was not performed in full in the public playhouses, i.e.,
Erne argues that many of Shakespeare’s plays are too long to have been
performed in their entirety and that substantial abridgement would have been
the usual practice when preparing them for the stage;

Authors
who exceeded this length by a significant margin must have had an audience in
mind which was not that of the public stage;

Ergo, Shakespeare was a "Literary dramatist"
who composed plays both for the stage and the page, and not just for the stage.

Impressive
to say the least… If you love empirically grounded narratives, this book is for you. Regardless of its “validity”, it’s always nice when someone tries to stir
the waters…

On a side
note, Erne’s hypothesis is strangely absent from Wells’ and Taylor’s Textual
Companion ( through ThemisAthena's courtesy I was made aware of this volume, and what a wonderful edition it was to my Shakespeare's library)

sábado, julho 25, 2015

I’m lost in the desert, beer thirsty, hungry, and
desperately searching for any sort of book-nourishment Shakespeare-related.
What is that I see in the distance? It's something stuck in the sand, and I think
it may be oval. As I get closer, I’m also able to see it more clearly. Is it a
cave? Yes, I think it is! But to where does it lead? Doesn't matter! As I bend
down to enter the cave, I’m able to see something deep inside. I can't quite
make out what it is; I need to squint my eyes, trying to focus as I begin to slowly
waddle towards it. As I get closer, I’m able to discern something. I think I
may know what it is, but I don't want to get my hopes up only to be utterly
devastated. But wait, yes it is, it's a book! It’s a book with the word
“Shakespeare” on the cover. I start furiously waddling towards that delectable,
precious gift from heaven, practically falling on my damn face until I notice
that the cave has narrowed. I have to slow down my pace, but I clearly am not
deterred, because I’m going to get to that book no matter what. However, as I’m
thinking that, my shoulders begin to hit the cave walls, knocking me back and
forth as I make my way forward, until I’m no longer able to waddle, having to
resort to more prosaic methods of locomotion, i.e., crawling on my hands and
knees…. At this point I’m on my precious “tummy” and using my hands to pull
myself forward as the cave is now barely large enough to fit my stretched-out
body. But Shakespeare makes me persevere. Sweating like a pig, and as the
friction of the walls and the sand on the ground scrape my skin, I can finally
feel the book with my fingertips. I frantically and desperately try to toss the
book back towards my head. I’m able to strain my neck as I still try to twist
my body through the cave, taking one small, pathetic peek at the book. It’s
when I see the book cover in its entirety. It’s a book about the thefts of
First Folios…My heart gives a lurch! As
I started reading it on my way back, after coming out of the cave, I can see the
book is as dry as the Sahara!!!

'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.'

From Macbeth

This quote is one of my favourites. I thought
about it while reading Rasmussen’s book. It captures a bit of everything that
Shakespeare means to me. The brief tedium of life, the acting analogy, how puny
we are in the overall scheme of things. So few people have been able to
articulate and communicate such things in a way which we can so immediately
connect with. It appears to me, that there's no Christianity here. No
recognition of an after-life. No concept of the idea that this short life is
merely part of a longer journey. No redemption. The quote appears unnervingly
modern. This shows us how, as Ben Jonson said, that Shakespeare is 'not of an age but for all time'. How
can someone who died nearly 400 years ago speak to us so directly when we
imagine him still wrapped in religion and believing in witches (ah well, that
was probably just for James I's benefit). As a dramatist speaking through so
many different characters, Shakespeare became the consummate ventriloquist,
able to explore so many ideas and perspectives, to probe human nature, to hold
the looking glass to our souls.

What we love best about Shakespeare is that all
life is here. Wherever we are, we can find something that encapsulates what we
feel. My taste in Shakespeare is not static, it moves with different stages of
my life. What is certain is that there is always something new to discover - in
life and in Shakespeare.

Unfortunately this book did nothing to satiate my
hunger for something new Shakespeare-wise…

I say. No redemption for thieves stealing
Shakespeareana as well as for authors writing dry books even if they’re about
Shakespeare…

NB: 3 stars to the episode with Pope Paul VI, the most unlikely Folio thief of all. When asked by someone from Rasmussen's team to bless the Royal Shakespeare Company's treasured copy, the Pope misunderstood and instead accepted it as a gift, and there goes another Folio, this time "stolen" by the Pope himself! The Vatican eventually returned it, but only after some deft behind-the-scenes diplomacy.

(We don’t think at all, Man is not a really thinking Being: we listen.”

With one of his usual aphorisms, Eduardo
Lourenço is able to sum-up not only his long coexistence with Music, but also
his attitude of being a permanent listener. But listening to what?

Eduardo Lourenço is one of the few original
thinkers able to hear the other, be it the President, or a taxi driver. His
unquenchable thirst to devour everything on his path, made the act of listening to music a recurrent activity, maybe even more important than speech itself.

Unable to write about Lourenço’s writing, I
humbly stand aside to make room for his own voice (my own loose translations
from Portuguese into English).

(Well, nothing lends itself so well for the
justification of the monumental gap between listening and feeling than music.
It’s quite evident that the majority of the Bach listeners do not understand his
music: they feel it, make a whole with it when listening to it, and nothing
more. But that happens with all musical expression. Feeling is the smallest
degree of ownership: it’s just a listening with the available feelings of
pleasure, displeasure, delight, or annoyance, all in all, a like-it-or-not
listening moment.” (page 60)

(Bartók’s concerto:
the more I listen to it, the more I convince myself that the liquid anguish of
a world looking for its blasted heart has found in its music the real road, the
pure syncopated search and in exaltation will give us the improbable future
wherein death and life will be only dream.” (page 67)

(If one day I return to God, if nothing else,
I'll owe it to these roads of a heartrending wistfulness that from the
Gregorian chant up to Messian, devour the feeling of reality of the visible
world.)

A last word to the wonderful work of Barbara
Aniello, a very able Italian researcher in music, art history, and musicology. This
“tailoring and sewing” of Eduardo Lourenço’s manuscript pages must have been a
real nightmare. For our utter delight, she was able to put into perspective all
of these musical moments.)

The more I read Lourenço, the more I realize
that his texts are not black and white, because his writing his mainly poetic
even when he’s writing in a sort of prose.

(Between Wagner and Mahler; facsimile of a
manuscript currently in the Gulbenkian collection)

quinta-feira, julho 23, 2015

“My name is Nat Love, as you may well know. I am also
called Deadwood Dick, and you have wronged me and the woman I love.”

One of
my favourite Westerns is Ford’s “The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance”.The film contains the famous line “When the legend becomes fact, print the
legend” and takes that line as its premise in its examination of how myth
often overtook fact in the forging of the West.

Lansdale’s
“Paradise Sky” beautifuly explores this territory:

“Now, In the living of my life, I’ve killed deadly men and
dangerous animals and made love to four Chiniese women, all of them on the same
night and in the same wagon bed, and one of them with a wooden leg, which made
things a mite difficult from time to time. I even ate some of the dead fellow
once when I was crossing the plains, though I want to rush right in here and
make it clear I didn’t know him all that well, and we damn sure wasn’t
kinfolks, and it ll come about by a misunderstanding.”

The
exaggerated and baroque telling of the stories that surround the figures of novel
appeal to me as a classic example of the human tendency toward embellishment:

“I will admit to a bit of true curiosity as to how that
backside of hers was far more attractive than the front, but I wasn't about no
mischief of any kind."

His
imagery is à la Sergio Leone in a pastiche-like
kind of way:

“’I’d rather shoot you, then shoot myself,’ he
said.

‘Okay.
You shoot me, then shoot yourself.’

‘What
if I shoot you, then I make an escape?’

‘I’d rather
it not work that way.’

‘But
it could.’

‘Here’s
the deal: you shoot me only if you have reckoned you’re going to have to shoot
yourself, otherwise we’ll try for escape together.’

The
figures of the Wild West were in action less than 200 years ago, yet look at
all the godlike and uncanny deeds that
are attributed to them and the inhuman drama that we’re told their lives were
filled with. These real-life characters who were often just thugs and criminals
have been transformed, after kicking the
bucket, into icons whose sagas now bear little resemblance to their actual
lives.

What
is a myth? Did we invented it? Not really. Myth tells the truth in a certain
way. “Paradise Sky” serves as a the perfect blueprint for how all mythic belief
systems operate. If we magnify the distortions by 10 times or more we can see
what tiny little wisps of truth may actually lie buried in the accounts of the
characters who are said to have roamed the Wild West ages ago.

As with some previous attempts, Lansdale has perfected
the technique of taking simple, everyday language and making it sound literary,
turning cussing into poetry. Descriptions are colourful and expressive. Action
is rendered economical, terse and compelling, while dialogue is most vivid,
punctuated with jokes and Lansdale’s summaries of longer tirades: “His eyes was aimed on a fly
sitting on a stack of papers on his desk. That bug would lift its wings now and
then as if to fly, but it was just a posture. He stayed where he was. Every
time those wings lifted, Colonel Hatch would hold his breath, as if fearing it
would take to the air and buzz away. Way he was watching that damn fly you’d
have thought he was beading down on a charging Apache.”

I’ve talked
about Lansdale’s dialogue en passant,
but I must elaborate some more. Some of
it downright funny. Amid the one-liners and the slosh, the homey dialogue,
Lansdale explores what it means to be human. On top of that, he just makes
it all seem a little more interesting:

“Chocktaw
got one of his socks and some rags out of his saddle bag. You could smell that
sock even with the rain and the wind blowing. It wasn’t pleasant.

‘You
really going to use that sockj^’’ Doolittle said.

‘I
am.’

‘Ain’t
you got no clean ones?’

‘I
do.’

‘So
you’re just being mean?’

‘I am.
I used it to wipe a little cow doo off my boots when I changed socks yesterday,
so there might be something in them you can chew on.’

The absurdity of Lansdale’s characters is a
must-see (read?). A persisting theme of the novel is the gap between who a
person is and who they appear to be, and watching a Lansdale character slowly
reveal their many layers over the course of a story is always something to
watch for.

Number of words written (in 40 reviews and in a few other stuff in-between: Computer Science Texts, Film Reviews, Theatre Reviews, Opera Reviews, Exhibition Shows, etc.): 47328

Number of pages read: 9303 (358 pages per week; 1551 pages per month):

Reading Chart per Month (Abril came out as the winner):

My blog hits around the globe (Booklikes):

This year I'm doing better at reading things published in 2015 than I did in 2014, although I'm still a little bit behind the curve there. The little gadget, as expected, he's having some impact on my reading drive.

Goals for the second half of 2015 are more or less the same as the ones I had at the end of last year:

- Read more about and by Shakespeare (9 books so far, and counting...);

- Read more non-fiction (e.g., Computer Science, Physics, Poetry)

NB: The 5 Shakespeare plays/books (“Hamlet”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “Much Ado about Nothing” and “The Tempest”) I've read this year were read in tandem with the same 5 plays from my Rowse. This means I've read more than 9303 pages...Reading the plays in such quick succession like this I saw more clearly the cross-over in the different plays. Love being a popular common theme isn't surprising, but I really want to know how many friars were convincing young women to fake their own deaths back then. And if you don't have to fake your own death there's probably a fairy or some sort of trickery at play in this match making. Watch out for the plotting villainous brothers. And surely there is a Duke or Prince nearby for some words of wisdom or to smooth everything over. Shakespeare was a master at just picking elements from a hat and building a scene around them: Villainous brother, fairies, ship wreck - and go! He weaves the elements together brilliantly and each play has its own breath and uniqueness. I'm captivated by different elements in each. And yet each one I read I was spotting something familiar from the one I had read just before. That's probably part of their charm.

sexta-feira, julho 03, 2015

When I
read the first 25 pages, my first objection was to how the moon was broken up
into so few large pieces. The verisimilitude hangs on the likelihood of meteor
bombardment coming down to what the Agent was, and I'm not aware of anything we
currently know of that could break apart the moon like that. I had huge
problems with this premise right at the beginning of the book.To get through it
without getting hung up on this hypothesis, I just told myself that maybe it
was some weird high energy particle or quantum bullshit, because theoretically
anything is possible, just varying levels of likely.

When
do I decide that I’m reading something impossible? There are no ghosts,
dragons, goblins, leprechauns, hobbits, or any kind of magical transitions between
worlds. Even when magical events and beings show up in SF, I expect the writer
will keep everything under control. A work of fiction that piles
impossibilities upon impossibilities would be extremely tiresome on my
endurance capacity and in the end likely lead toward me giving up on it
forever. In the same way, a work of fiction that is remarkably rich in
invention and in which the terms of impossibility in the SF world are not made
clear until late in the narrative is apt to be also tiresome. On the other
hand, a clear explanation of the limits of the impossible (in this case, the disappearance
of the moon and its effects, e.g., the end of all Lunar calenders, shorter work
days due to tidal friction…) can provide a convenient setting for the telling
of the story:

“The lack of a moon meant that New Earth’s tides were caused entirely by the
gravity of the sun, which made them weaker and more closely synchnonized with
the cycle of night and day.“

In a realm
of impossibilities, “Seveneves” is clearly grounded in reality (physics is a
more apt word). The only “impossibility” is the disappearance of the moon, but its effects are not really fiction.

Stephenson
definitely sides with the inner geek in me:

“What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any
of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman socity. It’s out ability
to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need
to breed nerds.”

One of
the longest sections in the book narrates a mission to bring back a comet to
the ISS and fly it into the same orbit as the space station, and it’s, without
a doubt, one of the better dramatic action sequences ever rendered on the
written page, be it SF or otherwise.

As
usual the infodumps à la Stephenson are some of the best parts in the book (it
awakens the geek in me):

“Today we’re going to talk about what it means to have a
swarm of arklets, he said. In normal space, like on Earth, we use three numbers
to tell where something is. Left-right, forward-back, up-down. The x, y, and z
axes from your high school geometry class. Turns out that this doesn’t work so
well in orbit. Up here we need six numbers to fully specify what orbit an
object, such as an arklet, happens to be in. Three for position. But another
three for velocity. If you’ve got two objects that share the same six numbers,
they’re in the same place.”

As
I’ve said elsewhere, Neal Stephenson is the king of the infodump and the
“tell, don’t show” trait in SF.

Is
there any truth to the “show, don’t tell” fiction maxim? Once I belonged to the
field that believed that good fiction should not break this cardinal rule of
“showing, not telling”. Now, I’m not so sure. It goes without saying that
there’s a degree of truth about this, but I’m not sure that this a clear-cut theme.

Fiction is art, and you need to dramatize, not just state
things. The sentence “I’m a handsome man” is not a handsome turn of phrase, and
though authors are welcome to use it, they shouldn’t think it will do much work
for them. I remember when I attended a class in English Literature at
Universidade de Letras de Lisboa, when I
wrote something breaking this cardinal rule,
I remember my teacher saying something like (I can’t recall the exact
words), “First of all, get rid of the ‘adjectives’ cliché, (i.e., the
“telling”); on top of that, one can
evoke an incredible feeling of happiness, sadness, etc. in the rest of the
novel.” or something like this.

Stephenson’s
approach is the opposite of this. Does it work? It works for me. I know I’m
reading Neal Stephenson, so the out-of-narrative exposition is a given and on
top of that it’s going to make me smarter:

“All conversations worth having about space voyages were
couched in terms of ‘delta vee,’ meaning the increase in velocity that had to
be imparted to a vehicle en route. For, in a common bit of mathematical
shorthand, the greek letter delta (∆) was used to mean ‘the amount of change
in…’ and V was the obvious abbreviation for velocity. The words ‘delta vee,’
then, were what you heard when engineers read those symbols aloud. Since
velocity was measured in meters per second, so was delta vee.”

“The conversation turned now to mass ratio: a figure
second only to delta vee in its importance to space mission planning. It simply
meant how much propellant the vehicle needed at the start of the journey in
order to effect all the required delta vees.”

Even
at 880 pages, the subplots felt rushed. I was quite disapointed with the break
in the narrative (a five thousand years gap). It’s quite hard to swallow. If I
spend a huge amount of time reading a ton of pages detailing the details of the
world, it feels like an easy way out to then leave out 5,000 years’ worth of
information. Another thing that jarred my “sensibility” was the submarine
subplot. It was briefly mentioned once. So, it’s good that all these groups
survived, but then, what’s the point of it? It’s not clear and Stephenson does
not follow-up on it.

NB:
The title of the best character name ever invented in a SF work goes to Neal
Stephenson: “Sonar Taxlaw”. I also loved
the reasoning behind the name…